At Buzz Machine, Jeff Jarvis has a good post about Beatblogging, which is a collaboration between thirteen news orgs and Jay Rosen's NewAssignment.net. Jay says how the reporter has a new role, more facilitation than reporting, and this is "turning reporting inside-out: Before, the reporter put himself at the center, because it was through him that reporting flowed to the press and public. Now there can be a network of people who report and advise and the reporter should be asking himself what he can do to help them do that better; the reporter stands not at the center but at the edge, which reporters must learn is where the action really is." [Link] Another good quote:
... here’s the dangerous question: What if the reporter does such a good job organizing such a good network that it runs on its own, gathering and sharing news and information and answering questions that need to be answered, so that the reporter isn’t needed anymore? Could happen, no? But I don’t think it will — if reporters learn to redefine themselves. Indeed, I think that reporters can make themselves even more valuable to wider publics and networks. The key verb in this paragraph is “organize.” In the old definition, at the bottom of that funnel, the verb was “control:” the reporter controlled access to the public and to news judgment and to news events and to the experts. But the internet removes those choke points. And though there are self-organizing systems on the internet, most of them are less self-organized than they look; that was one of Jay’s first lessons when he researched Assignment Zero: open-source projects have wranglers, organizers. The network may not find each other without the organizer; it may not identify the people who really know what they’re talking about; it may not make connections between questions and answers; it may not have someone devoted and paid to getting access and finding facts as a reporter should. The more independently these networks can operate, though, the more efficiently they can run, and the more of them we can have gathering more news and information. But they need organizers. And that means the key skill of the journalist shifts to organization.Creative Commons, Commercial Use, and Privacy
I return to the wisdom of Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg when he advised media moguls at Davos not to think that they could create communities but to instead realize that these communities already exist and so they should be asking what they can contribute to help them do what they already do better. Mark’s prescription: give them elegant organization. When you think about it, that has always been the mission of journalism: organizing information so communities can organize their activities. Now we have new and better means to do that. So I think beatblogging can get journalism back to its essential mission, discarding the distractions brought on by the means of production and distribution to which the journalists once had exclusive access. The role of the journalist becomes clearer, even purer: They organize information for communities and communities of information.
Following up my earlier post about the law suit that involves Creative Commons: here's a clarification of my thinking after a conversation with someone who knows the territory pretty well.
The situation: Virgin Mobile's ad agency created a promotion that used Flickr images with Creative Commons licenses that allowed commercial use with attribution. The family of a sixteen year old girl appearing in one of the images is suing Virgin Mobile because they didnt' get a model release allowing the use of her image. The family is suing Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons. In my earlier post, I said that the photographer may also have some liability.
What I think now, acknowledging that I'm not a lawyer and this is just the speculation of a fairly well-informed layman, influenced somewhat by discussion with another knowledgeable person who is also not an attorney:
Virgin Mobile, or whoever was creating the campaign for them, should have known that a model release was necessary.
The suggestion that the photographer might have some liability here was based on an assumption I heard discussed in one of the threads about the issue, where someone speculated that he would be included in the suit because he offered the photo fro commercial use (i.e. used a license that allowed commercial use) without obtaining a release. However all he did was articulate a license relative to his rights as the photographer, pertaining to the use of his copyright image. This doesn't imply that commercial use of the image might not involve other rights, i.e. the model's. that should be addressed by an entity using the image in a commercial context. It seems to me that it's not the photographer's responsibility to ensure that the release is in place unless he's the one making commercial use of the image.
I'm also pretty sure Creative Commons would have no liability. I think CC was included in the suit based on a misunderstanding – I saw language suggesting an assumption that "Creative Commons licensed the image." This is incorrect: the author of the work, in this case the photographer, licenses the image. Creative Commons just offers a kind of boilerplate for various "share" licenses, it has no direct involvement in the licensing of any specific content.
We'll have better answers when we see what happens in court, but I wanted to post a clarification because I think my earlier post could cause some confusion (if anyone took it seriously, probably unlikely since, as I said, I am not a lawyer!).
Careful with that Creative Commons license...A Texas family is suing Virgin Mobile and Creative Commons because a photo of their 16-eyar-old daughter was taken from Flickr and used in a a Virgin Mobile ad campaign. The pic had a Creative Commons license allowing commercial use with attribution, but neither the photographer nor Virgin Mobile got a model release from the girl. The photographer might have some liability here, too, for using a license that permits commercial use, without getting the release. sesh00 on Flickr posted the Virgin Mobile ad; there's an interesting long thread of conversation attached to that photo, starting with the girl's comment: "hey that's me! no joke. i think i'm being insulted...can you tell me where this was taken."
Citizens vs editors: what's news?BBC News says, based on a new report from Pew Research Center, that "a news agenda formulated by citizens would be radically different from that put together by journalists." Suspicions confirmed for those of us who are swimming in it:
Seven out of ten of the stories selected by the user-driven sites came from blogs or non-news websites with only 5% of stories overlapping with the ten most widely-covered stories in the mainstream media.
"Users gravitated towards more eclectic stories. There was a sense that users sifting through a lot of raw information; rumour, gossip, propaganda and the news were all throw into the mix," said Tom Rosenstiel, one of the authors of the report.
The study also suggests that readers (here in techville, we call 'em users) want to know a little about a lot of things, rather than going deep. If there's bad news, it's that readers were more interested in stories about consumer products and companies (iPhone, Nintendo) than in public affairs (Iraq, immigration).
I looked for this study at the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, but I didn't find it. I did findf an August 9 report that says the "Internet news audience" is "highly critical of news organizations."
More broadly, the new survey underscores the fundamental change in basic attitudes about the news media that has occurred since the mid-1980s. In the initial Times Mirror polling on the press in 1985, the public faulted news organizations for many of its practices: most people said that news organizations "try to cover up their mistakes," while pluralities said they "don't care about the people they report on," and were politically biased.New media and politics
But in the past decade, these criticisms have come to encompass broader indictments of the accuracy of news reporting, news organizations' impact on democracy and, to some degree, their morality. In 1985, most Americans (55%) said news organizations get the facts straight. Since the late 1990s, consistent majorities – including 53% in the current survey – have expressed the belief that news stories are often inaccurate. As a consequence, the believability ratings for individual news organizations are lower today than they were in the 1980s and 1990s. (See "Online Papers Modestly Boost Newspaper Readership," July 30, 2006.)
ABC has a good article, "Getting Beyond 'Gotcha,'" on the impact of new media (e.g. YouTube) on politics.
... many presidential candidates have tried to get beyond the "gotcha" with their own versions of behind-the-scenes videos. John Edwards paid a team of bloggers to travel with him and document his presidential announcement tour and has also produced a series of "webisodes" that explore his campaign from behind the scenes. Edwards says the webisodes, which are uploaded to YouTube, are "based on who I really am, not based on some plastic Ken doll …"
Chuck Olsen, a Minneapolis-based video blogger for Rocketboom.com, was one of those whom Edwards paid to come along on the tour. Olsen got to hang out on the campaign plane, chat with Edwards, and even drink wine with the campaign staff after a town hall meeting in Iowa. He kept his camera rolling, and posted a dispatch on his Web site, MinnesotaStories.com
"I know I'm being used," says Olson, who openly questions whether he could have provided an unbiased perspective of the campaign. But he realizes the power of online video to hold candidates like Edwards accountable. "Candidates have to always be 'on,'" Olson says. "If they screw up, suddenly a lot of people will see it."(I've met Chuck, and Olsen with an 'e' is the correct spelling, incidentally. Not meaning to criticize the editors at ABC News. After all, "a foolish consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds.")
NewAssignment.net rocks on
Reuters is funding the first editor for Jay Rosen's citizen media project, NewAssignment.net. [Link]
Journalism 2.0A couple of insightful posts following on the Nick Lemann "Journalism without journalists" piece in New Yorker. After posting about it, I was thinking that further discussion would be a waste of energy – thinking it's pointless for those of us who are stewing in the rich juices within the blogosphere stewpot to spend energy wrangling with those who stand outside, watching the pot boil, reluctant to jump in.
However there are a good couple of follow-up posts, from Jay Rosen and Rebecca MacKinnon, that I should mention here.
In "The Pros Gonna Blog You Under the Table," Jay Rosen questions the contention within some circles that professional journalists are inherently better at the blog sorta thing; that independent blogging will collapse and the web will become an "ordinary media space."
But what the sweaty champions of “journalism as a form of blogging” overlook is how hard it is for your average reporter to thrive in the link-filled, argument-rich, emotionally-present, here’s-where-I-stand style that traditional bloggers have cultivated over the years. It takes time. Perhaps the hardest part is you actually have to be interested in what other people are saying.
Jay notes that "some of the most prominent press bloggers, faced with the rigors of posting every day, have quietly abandoned the form...."
Rebecca, in "'Real' Journalism on the Read-Write Web," responds to Nick Lemann's concluding statement in his New Yorker piece, "As journalism moves to the Internet, the main project ought to be moving reporters there, not stripping them away." Rebecca agrees:
Absolutely. Journalism schools are not going to be doing their jobs unless they're doing everything possible to help students get comfortable alongside bloggers and everybody else here on the Internet. Bloggers hang out here every day, ready to engage journalists in debate and conversation, and even to collaborate with them for the sake of a more informed public discourse. The most effective journalists of the future will find ways to utilize the Internet's read-write potential, as opposed to 20th-century media's read-only capacity.
Rebecca points to another excellent responses to Lemann's piece, written by Jeff Jarvis, a successful convert from traditional to citizen media. Jeff writes about "Bigger, Better Journalism," providing a list of new possibilities for journalism on the web.
I would argue that social media is evolution, not revolution. Dinosaurs may resist evolution, but eventually they get what the mammals are trying to tell them, and become birds.
Dan Gillmor on "creative destruction" and the democratization of mediaDan Gillmor's been channeling the citizen media meme longer than anyone, in fact, he wrote the book. He just made a terrific speech at Columbia University about the democratization of media.
On my blog in early 2005 I posted an essay-in-progress. It was called "The End of Objectivity (Version 0.91)." I suggested that the journalism of the new century would be better served if we all considered abandoning the worthy ideal of objectivity and replacing it with a collection of honored principles, only one of which was not already embedded in tradition. Now, by reinforcing those principles with the emerging tools of a Digital Age, we can create something even better.YouTube
By giving that blog posting a version number of less than 1.0, I wasn't just making a techie joke. I was calling attention to another reality of tomorrow's journalism. In a craft that's shifting from lecture to conversation, the publication (or broadcast or whatever) is not The End. It is somewhere in the middle of an emergent system in which we all can keep learning, and teaching.
This is increasingly doable in part because of what has changed so much for so many: the collision of technology and media, which has helped democratize communications and is turning traditional notions of journalism in new directions. Now, I don't mean democratization so much as in the sense of voting -- though collective community thinking is an intriguing and valuable part of what's coming. I mean it in the sense of wide participation.
YouTube's success as an online aggregator of video snippets suggests that digital convergence is the wave of the present. However the system still faces challenges, [Link]
Others see potentially troublesome similarities between YouTube and the original Napster file-sharing service, which made it easy to download free music, often illegally. It was sued and eventually shut down for rampant copyright violations.Jeff Jarvis: Interaction vs. Reaction
Like Napster, YouTube is totally free. It is also filled with video cribbed from TV shows and movies - clips that violate copyrights.
YouTube "has a strong position right now, but we'll have to see how much staying power it really has," said Mary Hodder, chief executive of Dabble.com, a startup offering a way to track all the video cropping up on the web. "You can't help but wonder whether YouTube will eventually lose its audience the way Napster did."
Jeff Jarvis has a good post about the real value of interactivity. "Interactivity is about more than reaction. It is about creation. It is not about controlled authority. It is about sharing authority." Indeed. (This resonates with a conversation I had recently with a reporter from the Austin Chronicle.)
German Wikipedia back up - because it was never "down"AP has an interesting bit of inaccurate reporting:
The Wikimedia Foundation, which runs the collaborative Web encyclopedia, reached a temporary settlement with a Berlin court that will let users access the German-language version of Wikipedia at http://de.wikipedia.org, hosted in the United States, instead of its usual http://www.wikipedia.de.
Actually the site was always available at http://de.wikipedia.org/, without disruption. Some German Wikipedia users own the domain http://www.wikipedia.de/, and had a page there that referred users to the correct domain. Those users were ordered to take their page down breifly, but the order was reversed. The German courts never had any contact with Wikimedia foundation. [Link]
Washington Post: No CommentsThe Washington Post turned comments off at the post.blog. According to Exec Editor Jim Brady, the comments included too many personal attacks. More than the Post could handle... though I wonder if they were trying to use existing staff to moderate? High-volume comment areas, like forums, generally need skilled moderators, or at least experienced monitors (monitors, unlike moderators, do little to drive conversation but remove posts that include trolls or personal attacks). It's economically difficult, though, for a newspaper to staff up with 24/7 moderators, who generally get $30/hour or more for their work. Hopefully the Post will find a solution; the interactivity is vital. [Link]